The quality and focus of your marketing campaigns in commercial real estate will attract volumes of clients and prospects over time, providing you build quality and target marketing into your promotional processes. Build your brand through your current marketing processes with all of your listings.
(N.B. these ideas are also sent out to regularly to our friends in Commercial Real Estate Online Snapshot to help amplify brokerage results…. Get your access here)
So the rule here is typically that ‘a quality focus in promotional activity generally attracts quality new business in local property’. The best clients and investors locally like to work with the agents that have a market domination of the location and the property type.
Compare the competitors
Compare your marketing solutions to those used by your competitors:
- Can you claim to be more relevant and real as an agent in your property activities?
- Do your advertising efforts stand out as the best for the property type or the location?
- Will people remember you at the right time?
Review and research your market position when it comes to your brokerage and your personal profile. Examine where you are now in the order and ranking of local agents. Drive a better profile.
Here are some ideas to help you stand out as a ‘go to agent’ for your location:
- Property and target market match – Always match your property to a target market before the campaign of promotion commences. Help the client understand the target market that you are chasing and why that is the case.
- Local area coverage and regional coverage – When you promote your listings, devote different strategies to the local area, versus the broader region. Vendor paid marketing funds should allow you to specialize your property coverage and penetration.
- Online marketing versus traditional marketing – You will need to mix and match your marketing to the online and offline media outlets and channels. Think about everything from the traditional signboard through to website coverage, and the industry portals. Your exclusive listings should get special attention in that process. Use the email marketing system as well as the more traditional approaches to listing distribution.
- Brochures and photographs – Some people like to review the local papers and or get a brochure in the mail, so photos and brochures are valuable in property marketing. Use them in directly marketing the listings that you have. The direct marketing process has merit as long as you are taking the time to follow through with telephone calls and direct contact. If you have spent the money in mail outs, then make the calls to see what others think of the listing and the brochure.
- Editorials – When you have a good quality listing coming to the market, get an editorial ready for release, and promote that editorial to the local papers and media outlets. If the property has a good history or local relevance, an editorial is a good strategy to use promotionally.
- Database – Use your database in your client and prospect discussions. Create a shortlist of people from your database to inspect a property as soon as it is released to the market for sale or lease. It is hard for a client to overlook a relevant database of local contact.
- Feedback – Seek comments from the people that you take to your listed properties and hold inspections with. Allow their comments to shape your clients thinking and their perceptions of the property as it is being marketed. This is called ‘third party conditioning’ and it is a valuable strategy in shaping a property for better listing and or negotiation outcomes.
- Reset and refresh your listing advertisements – Don’t let an advert for property remain unchanged for too long. Refresh your listing stock promotions with different promotional copy and feature points every 3 weeks or so.
These simple and yet direct strategies are valuable in delivering high quality property promotions. They allow ‘high end’ coverage, and will attract better levels of inquiry. Refine and revisit all of your commercial property promotions accordingly, with a real bias towards your exclusively listed assets.